More students saying yes to Clemson University offer

CLEMSON - Clemson University has gotten more students to say "yes" after receiving an acceptance letter from the school this year in large part due to scholarship programs targeting key groups.

Clemson University's director of financial aid, Chuck Knepfle, spoke Tuesday during the regular monthly meeting of the Clemson faculty senate to explain how his office has leveraged money to get more of the state's top high-school seniors and more out-of-state students to come here. This, he said, is the so-called "yield" rate.

A record number of freshmen enrolled this fall – 3,435 students. This was 500 more students in the freshman class than the fall of 2011.

Tuition and fees for an in-state student living on campus this year was $21,726, Out-of-state students faced a ticket price of $38,370.

Knepfle said Clemson spent an additional $4 million on scholarship packages for the 2012-2013 school year; but the school also took in $10 million more in tuition dollars. By netting $6 million, Knepfle said, the school's efforts to get better students paid for itself.

One thing that's new this year, he said, is an expansion of the university's long-standing policy to offer out-of-state tuition waivers to students getting top scores on the SAT. Up until last year, anyone scoring at least a 1370 would face a sticker price reduced by $17,000 to $18,000 a year.

"Of course, that meant those scoring a 1360, 1350 or 1340 weren't enrolling at a high rate," Knepfle said. "So the first thing we did was stretch out that scholarship. Instead of all or nothing, we did a tiered approach."

The floor is now set at 1250, with these students getting $5,000.

"So we went from a yield rate of 12 percent to 20 percent for students scoring a 1250 or above," Knepfle said. "There's a direct correlation we are very happy with."

Knepfle said his office also wanted to recruit more of the state's top Palmetto Fellows. These in-state students receive state-paid $6,700 scholarships their freshman year if they have scored a 1200 on the SAT, have a 3.5 GPA and are in the top 6 percent of their graduating class. They receive $7,500 the other three years of college.

Knepfle said all Palmetto Fellows have been receiving an extra $2,500 from Clemson; he said an additional $2,500 was offered to the top half of these students this year.

"We went from a 42 percent yield rate to 50 percent," Knepfle said. "That's a phenomenal rate for a school."

Knepfle said his office has more flexibility when it comes to waiving out-of-state tuition rates than it does offering scholarship money to students. This is because of a state law that caps the amount of scholarship money a public institution can offer to students to 4 percent of general revenues.

"People might think we just put a whole lot more money toward out-of-state students than in-state," said Knepfle, who came to work at Clemson two years ago from his job at the University of Miami in Ohio. "We are really hampered with that law."

Operating within a limited amount of money, Knepfle said, he studies where the university wants to see more students saying "yes" and the financial incentives needed to get them here.

Clemson has about 1,000 black students out of an undergraduate population of 16,000, and Knepfle said his office has been looking for ways to step up minority recruitment. Clemson's admissions policies are race-blind.

"When I arrived, our office had $50,000 of endowed or annual gifts that we could direct to minority students," Knepfle said. "We increased that to $400,000 last year."

With moderate success, he said, his office is looking to bump up financial offers to minority students next year.